Overview
- Coco Robotics is deploying Niantic Spatial’s Visual Positioning System to bolster sidewalk robot navigation in cities including Los Angeles, Chicago, Jersey City, Miami, and Helsinki.
- The model was built from player-submitted scans in Pokémon Go and Ingress, enriched with metadata such as GPS coordinates, camera angle, device motion, time of day, and weather.
- Niantic Spatial says scanning has been voluntary and anonymized, with uploads not tied to player accounts and participation prompted via in‑app tasks like 2020’s Field Research.
- Coco operates roughly 1,000 delivery robots and reports hundreds of thousands of completed orders, using onboard cameras with VPS to improve location accuracy in urban canyons.
- Executives frame the partnership as an early step toward a continually updated “living map,” with future improvements driven by data generated in customer deployments.